Vental Frustration
by Just4FunFiction
Summary: Lori is having some friends over for a study group. But, when one of them accidentally becomes part of Lisa's latest experiment, what effects will it have, and can it be fixed? (Re-uploaded due to accidentally using the wrong document)


**(A/N: I've reuploaded this after I accidentally used the wrong document before. Now, the following story came about after a series of back and forth messages with Crafordbrian17, who helped me to work on this. This isn't exactly what they were asking for, but I hope that they still enjoy this, and I hope all of you do to. Enjoy!)**

It was a typical day in the Loud House, the sun outside shining in the clear blue sky, and everyone was creating their usual brand of chaos in some form or another. Lucy was outside, practicing her grave digging in the back yard, occasionally having to duck whenever Lynn accidentally kicked her soccer ball her way. The goth girl had already had to climb in to retrieve it once, and didn't want to have to do so again.

Upstairs in the house, Leni was searching around for her necklace, the ditzy blonde unaware that she was wearing it around her neck. Luna was in her room shredding on her axe, with the amps turned up to eleven, while Luan was practicing her ventriloquist routine with Mr Coconuts. Lincoln was in his room, playing a video game online with his friends from school. Lola and Lana were once again in the middle of a twin fight, the former instigating it after the latter let her snake loose and it took one of the pageant queen's tiaras. Lisa was creating something in a beaker, mixing it with a glass rod while Lily was playing with her bear in her crib.

"And that should do it," the four-year-old prodigy exclaimed, holding up the green liquid-filled beaker to eye level so she could inspect it. She poured it into four test tubes, putting three of them in a rack before setting the beaker down. "Now to find items to test it on."

She walked out of her room and downstairs, her mind focused on the compound she was carrying. As she entered the kitchen, she didn't even hear her eldest sister shout at her from the living room.

"You better not put that in my food!" Lori shouted, her hand cupped over her phone. "Otherwise, I will literally turn you into a human pretzel!" She put the phone back to her ear and smiled. "Not you, Boo Boo Bear. That was just Lisa." Yep, Lori was once again talking with her long-distance boyfriend, Bobby Santiago Jr. Ever since he moved to live with his extended family, they had been talking more frequently, pretty much any chance they had, which- given how often they talked before- was surprisingly more. She giggled. "Oh, Bobby! You are _so_ romantic!" She heard a knock at the door and stood up. "Sorry, Bobby. I have to go, there's someone at the door. Love you, Boo Boo Bear!" When she heard him respond, she hung up, placing the phone in her pocket. Walking over to the front door, she opened it and smiled at who was there. "Hey, guys."

"Hey, Lori!" The first one greeted. She was a blonde girl named Whitney, who had long, curly hair. She was wearing a pink t-shirt, white shorts, purple shoes with white socks, and white pearl earrings. She had a pink backpack on her back. "Thanks for having us over."

"Yeah, we really needed somewhere were we could just sit down and revise, you know?" The guy, a considerably larger guy named Chaz, added. He was wearing a blue baseball cap backwards over his dark blond hair, with a yellow and cream striped t-shirt, grey jeans and white sneakers. He had an orange backpack.

"You know we could have gone to the library to do so, right?" Lori inquired.

"Are you kidding?" The last one, a brunette named Dana, countered. She was wearing a purple and white striped long sleeved t-shirt, with a black dress underneath, as well as purple knee high socks, brown boots and red earrings. Her backpack was purple. "The library is way too quiet, it makes me feel like something is going to attack me."

"Well, alright, but you know my family are going to be super loud, right?"

"Perfect! I'll be able to tell if anyone is coming for me!"

Chaz rolled his eyes. "I still can't believe you study better under noise rather than in the quiet!"

She placed her hands on her hips. "I still can't believe you study!"

Both Whitney and Lori both laughed at the quip, whilst Chaz just rolled his eyes again. "Anywho," Lori spoke, "why don't we head up and get started?"

The three friends nodded, following Lori inside. "Coming through!" They heard someone say to their right. While her friends all looked at her, Lori just shrugged. As Lisa appeared through the dining room, still carrying her compound with a tray holding some potatoes, she didn't notice Geo rolling in his hamster ball, and so she tripped on it. "Gyahh!" She stumbled a bit, trying not to drop her tray or test tube, but eventually stopped, relieved to have not dropped anything. "Phew." Looking up, however, her relief drained away as she gulped. "Oops."

Whitney stood there, frozen in shock. The liquid compound that was previously in Lisa's test tube was now in the blond's hair. Lori, Chaz and Dana all looked on, waiting for her reaction. Eventually, Whitney shrieked, causing everyone to cover their ears. "IT'S IN MY HAIR!" She screamed, before shaking it about. "GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT!"

"Whitney, calm down!" Dana told her, putting her hands on her shoulders.

Whilst Dana and Chaz tried to calm her down, Lori glared at her younger sister. "What the hell did you just throw in her hair?" She growled.

Lisa adjusted her glasses. "Just an experimental compound I've been working on." Lori looked ready to grab her, but Lisa held up a hand to stop her from doing so. "Fear not. The compound is soluble to H2O, and should cause no lasting damage to the protein filaments growing from the follicles in her dermis." Lori just stared, not amused by her scientific terminology. "That means it should wash out, and won't damage her hair."

Whitney stopped panicking when she heard this. "Wait, seriously?" She asked the four-year-old.

"Did Einstein discover the laws that compose the photoelectric effect?" Everyone blinked, causing Lisa to groan, mumbling "asinine" before explaining, "that means yes."

Whilst Lisa returned to her room, Whitney exhaled in relief, turning to her friends. "Okay, I'm gonna go wash this out then."

"You know where the bathroom is right?" Lori asked.

"Upstairs, turn left, down the hall?" Lori nodded. "I'll be about five minutes."

Whilst Whitney headed to the bathroom, Lori led the others to her room. They sat on her and Leni's beds, with Lori getting books of her desk while the others got theirs out of their backpacks. "So, is it just Chemistry for you guys too, or are you struggling with any of the other classes?"

"It's the same for me and Whitney," Dana answered, then smirked at Chaz, "though Chaz is definitely flunking gym."

He crossed his arms over his gut and scowled. "I don't even get why we have to do gym!" He complained. "It's not gonna help me do what I want to do in the future, so I might as well not bother!"

Lori joined Dana in smirking at him. "Still, it couldn't hurt you to lose a couple pounds, Chaz. You'd probably fair better if you did."

"That's not what Leni told me," he grumbled.

"What was that?"

"Nothing!"

Dana and Lori looked at each other, before shrugging, just as Whitney entered the room, her hair clean and dry. "Okay, I think I got it all," she told her friends, sitting down next to Dana, who checked and gave her a nod. "Thankfully, my hair doesn't feel any different."

"Good to hear," Lori replied. "If that changes, I'll get Lisa and see what she knows."

"Okay." Whitney put her bag on the floor in front of her, pulling out her chemistry books. "So, is there any particular area you're struggling with?"

"Other than everything?" Chaz joked, eliciting chuckled from the three girls.

"Yeah, we're kind of hopeless with chemistry," Dana confessed.

"Well, at least we're all in the same boat," Lori pointed out. She opened her chemistry book. "So, why don't we start with-"

 **POOF**

Lori stopped talking immediately. "Start with what?" Whitney asked, but when she looked at Lori, she grew concerned at the stare she was receiving. Looking at Dana and Chaz, she saw they were doing the same, their eyes wide out of shock. "What? What is it?"

"Your hair," Dana uttered. "It just went… poof."

Whitney raised an eyebrow. "Poof? What does that mean?"

"Here," Lori told her.

She handed Whitney a compact mirror, and when she looked into it, her eyes went wide. All of a sudden, her hair had more than doubled in size. Whereas before it had reached down below her shoulders, it was now down to her waist. It was the same shape, just much larger, and just as curly.

"What… what the…" She gasped, unable to speak more than that. "How?"

They looked at the door when it opened and saw Lisa, looking at a clipboard. "Sorry to intrude, but I thought I should let you know that my serum may-" She looked up at Whitney, seeing what had happened to her hair, and gulped. "Oops?"

"Lisa," Lori sternly asked, "what have you done?" Sighing, Lisa handed Lori the clipboard. Lori looked it over and grew confused. "What does any of this mean?"

Lisa sighed. "To put it in more common terms, the experimental growth serum I was creating doesn't work over time, like I had hypothesised. Instead, it acts instantaneously," she clicked her fingers, "just like that. It is also a lot more potent than I had expected."

"Am I stuck like this?" Whitney cried out hysterically, looking on the verge of tears.

"I can't say for certain at this time." Whitney broke down crying, cupping her hands over her face. "I'll update you when I can. For now, I need to go and check on the other test subjects, the solanum tuberosum. Street name- potatoes."

With that, Lisa walked away. Dana began rubbing Whitney's back. "It's going to be okay, Whitney," she assured. "Honestly, it doesn't look that bad."

Whitney glared at her. "I look like the bride of Frankenstein!" She shouted angrily, before returning to her sobbing.

"Whitney, relax," Lori told her, kneeling down in front of her. "We can fix this."

"How?" She looked up at Lori, her eyes red and watery. "We don't even know what was in that serum stuff!"

"Maybe not," Lori smirked as she walked to her dresser, "but we've had our fair share of bad hair days. Enough to know that, if nothing else," she turned around, holding a comb and a hair curler, "we can _always_ style it out."

Dana and Whitney looked at each other, smiling confidently, before nodding at Lori. Dana moved Whitney onto Lori's bed, whilst Lori began searching through her drawers. For the next five minutes, the girls began trying everything they could to fix Whitney's hair, with Chaz handing them whatever they asked him to. They went through a montage of different techniques, including straightening it, curling it, using foam, washing it, combing it down, and blow drying it, but in the end, her hair stayed exactly the same.

"What am I going to do?" Whitney moaned, her head hanging down, disheartened. "I can't be seen like this!"

"There's got to be something else we can try!" Dana suggested. "But what?"

"I don't know…" Lori mulled. "Maybe we can just brush it down. Chaz, hand me the hairbrush."

Chaz looked through the drawers once more. "Uh… there's no hairbrush here."

"What?!" Lori pushed him aside and began rummaging through the drawers, but to no avail. "It's got to be in here somewhere! Bobby got me that brush for our ten week anniversary!"

"Remind me why you had a ten week anniversary?" Dana asked, but it fell on deaf ears.

Lori began turning the room upside down searching for it, looking in the wardrobe, under the beds, on the windowsill and any other possible place. After still not finding it, she huffed. "Maybe it's in the bathroom," she spoke, before stomping out. The others followed her in as she began searching desperately for it, again to no avail. "Where is that stupid hairbrush?!"

"I think I saw it in the vents."

"AAH!" The four of them screamed, turning around to see it was Lucy who had spoken.

"Okay, first of all, stop doing that!" Lori scolded. "Second of all, what do you mean, 'you saw it in the vents'?"

"Sigh. I was practicing my poetry one time, when all of a sudden, I hear a clunk and see a hairbrush land further down."

 _(Flashback)_

 _Lori was desperately rummaging through her wardrobe, throwing things haphazardly. "Where… is… that… dress!?" She growled. As she continued searching, she unknowingly grabbed a red wooden hairbrush and threw it, landing in the open vents. Further down the vents, Lucy looked up from her poetry, saw the hairbrush, then shrugged before returning to her poetry._

 _(End flashback)_

"Well, then, why didn't you grab it?!" Lori yelled.

"I didn't know it was yours," Lucy simply told her, before walking away.

"Great!" Lori sighed. "Now, I'll never get that brush back." She heard a clunk, and when she turned her head, she saw Whitney stood on the toilet, opening the vents. "Uh, Whitney? What are you doing?"

"Getting that hairbrush!" She replied, before hauling herself into the vent. She struggled to get in with her much larger head of hair, which was sticking out by a good few inches. "Come on, come on… ugh, stupid hair…"

"Come on, Whitney. You're not going to be able to get your hair in when it's like that, so just climb down and-" she didn't finish that, as Whitney was finally able to push herself in and began to crawl through.

"Whitney, get out of there!" Dana called up. "You're going to get stuck!"

"I'll be fine," Whitney grunted as she began to slowly crawl through the vents. Lori, Dana and Chaz followed the sounds of her hands against the metal as she crawled along, the noise prompting the rest of the Loud siblings to emerge from their rooms and look up out of curiosity. "I think I see it!"

"Dude, what's going on?" Luna asked.

"She's looking for a hairbrush," Dana explained, though this only prompted further confusion. "It's a long story!"

"I see it!" Whitney called out again. "Just a little… bit… further…" She tried to move further, the brush an arm's length away, when she felt something pulling. "Huh?" Looking back as best she could, she saw her hair was sticking out through one of the vent openings. She tried to pull it out by pushing further on, only to scream out in pain when it tugged at her scalp. "Ow!"

"Whitney?!" Lori called up. "Are you okay?"

"No!" She cried. "I can't reach the brush, because my hair's stuck!"

Lori looked down from the vents and went into the nearest bedroom, that being the twins' bedroom. Following her, everyone looked up and saw a huge amount of blonde, curly hair, sticking out a few inches in every possible direction through the opening, looking like spaghetti sticking through the cheese slicer side of a grater. "Can you move at all?" Lori asked.

"Not really, and when I do, it pulls on my hair and it hurts!"

"Alright, stay calm!" She turned to the second oldest Loud sister. "Leni, go get some scissors."

Leni began walking away. "Whitney, we're going to try and cut it, okay?"

"What?! But… I mean…" Although she loved her hair, Whitney realised that the direness of the situation. "Okay… Just, be careful, won't you?"

"Of course, I will." Leni returned with a pair of scissors. Taking them, Lori stepped up on her toes and reached to grab some of the large mass of hair. When she tried cutting it, however, the scissors broke. "What the?"

"It seems that the growth serum has given her hair increased strength and durability," Lisa pointed out, jotting it down. "One moment, please." She left the room, returning quickly with an abnormally large potato. Grabbing a hammer from Lana's toolbox under her bed, she swung it down on the potato, but rather than smash it, the hammer ricocheted off, launching Lisa into the wall with a thud. "Yep… I hypothesised correctly."

Lori groaned, rolling her eyes. "Leni, make sure she's okay." Whilst Leni did this, Lori turned to the others. "Okay, any other ideas?"

Everyone silently mulled this over in their heads, before Lana threw her hand up. "Ooh! I know!" She rushed under her bed and pulled out a handsaw. "I can use this to get her free!"

"Okay, one- that's incredibly dangerous, and two- if the scissors won't cut it, what makes you think that will?"

"I'm not gonna cut her hair, I'm gonna cut the vent grate, and pull it out of her hair!" Everyone's eyes widened at the idea, not having any better ideas themselves. "Lincoln, can you give me a lift up?"

"Sure, Lana," he told her. He kneeled down so she could climb on his shoulders, then stood back. She moved her feet so she could stand, with Lincoln holding her feet, and Lori standing behind them to make sure she doesn't fall down.

"You ready in there?" Lana asked.

"Be careful, okay?" Whitney asked back.

"Okay! Here goes!" Lana began to push the hair out of the way and cut at the grate. Whitney winced, fearful that she would get cut by accident. After a good two minutes of cutting, Lana cut through the vent grate on two ends. "Alright. I've cut the vent, so I'm going to try and slide it out through your hair, okay?"

"Just do it quickly! I don't want to be in here anymore!" Lana nodded, before grabbing the vent grate. She began to pull it through her hair, occasionally having to undo a knot her hair caused. She felt herself starting to fall, but Lori was there to catch her. However, this caused her to pull on Whitney's hair rather roughly. "Ouch!"

"Sorry!" Lana continued to pull it through. "Alright, I think I've almost… got it… and…" With one last tug, Lana fell into Lori's arms, the grate in her hands. "Got it!"

Everyone cheered for Lana, whilst Dana looked up at Whitney. "Hey, Whit!" She called. "You alright?"

"Yeah, I think so."

"Can you get out, now?" Chaz asked.

"I'll try. Hang on a second." She crawled forward a little more, just enough so that she was able to grab the hairbrush. "Are my feet by the opening?"

"Yeah!" Everyone answered.

"Alright. Here goes." She slowly began to shuffle backwards, swinging her feet out through the opening. Lori and Dana reached up to grab her by the ankles and began to ease her down, her legs following her feet, then her waist and torso, before her hair got stuck again. With a bit of tugging from the two twelfth graders, they finally pulled Whitney out, her hair bouncing up and down.

"You okay, Whit?" Lori asked.

While she was a bit disoriented, she was otherwise fine. "Yeah, I think so," Whitney told her, "plus, I got your hairbrush." She handed the hairbrush to Lori before looking at the others. "Who was it that got the grate off?" Lana threw her hand up, so Whitney kneeled down and hugged her. "Thanks. I thought it would have been hours before I got out."

"All in a day's work," Lana told her, tipping her hat.

* * *

An hour later, Whitney was now calm, and the four friends were able to return to studying. "You know, I think I'm starting to get this," Dana remarked.

"I know, right?" Chaz told her in agreement. "Maybe I'm not screwed after all!"

"Maybe today wasn't all bad," Whitney told everyone. "Still, how am I going to deal with my hair like this?" She pushed her hair up a bit, letting it fall down and bounce a bit.

"I'm sure you'll think of something," Lori assured her, before they all heard the door opening.

"Good, you're all here," Lisa spoke, looking at her clipboard again. "I have an update on the effects of the growth serum."

"Which is?" Lori asked.

"The solanum tuberosum have returned to their standard proportions and durability, which means-"

"Lisa, when will you start explaining things like a normal person?!"

Lisa sighed. "Asinine… fine. The potatoes returned to their normal size and strength. After making adjustments to my calculations based on the structure of human hair, I predict that your friend's hair should return to normal in five… four… three… two… one…"

Right on cue, Whitney's hair rapidly shrunk down to her usual size. Lori handed her a compact mirror again, and Whitney's eyes lit up at seeing her hair back to normal. "Yes! It looks exactly the same as before!" She cheered. She pushed her hair up and noticed it wasn't as bouncy, but still a little. "Actually, I think you've added volume to it."

"My apologies for causing temporary distress, but there should be no meg to your hair, and this has aided my research."

"Well, glad I could help, I guess. And don't worry, you're forgiven."

Lisa nodded. "Thank you. With that, I'll leave you to your studies."

Once Lisa was gone, Lori turned to Whitney. "You see? Everything's fine now."

"Yeah, you're right. Sorry for being so dramatic before."

"Don't worry about it," Dana told her. "I probably would've been the same."

"Me too," Lori added.

Whitney smiled and gave her a hug, with Lori and Chaz joining her. Shortly after, though, they heard a large rumbling, causing Chaz to blush. "Guess I should have something to eat," he admitted sheepishly. Reaching into his bag, he pulled out a paper bag, containing a sandwich wrapped in cellophane. He frowned upon looking at it. "Aw, man! I forgot that I didn't have any honey mustard!"

"I think we have some in the fridge," Lori told him.

"Be right back!" He shot up from the bed and walked out the door, closing the door behind him. Turning around, however, he screamed when he saw Lucy appear from nowhere. Grabbing his chest, he started taking deep breaths. "No offence, but you're pretty creepy, you know?"

"Sweet," she said with a smile, before walking away.

Once his breathing was back to normal, he realised his sandwich was gone. "Where's…" Looking up, he saw an opening in the vent right above him. "Aww, come on!" He looked around and saw a small table. Grabbing it, he positioned it under the opening, climbed onto it and tried reaching in to grab it, but couldn't grab it. "Great. Just great." He lifted himself up, causing the vents to creak as he poked his head in. Sticking one arm in as well, he tried to reach it, but it was just out of reach. "Come on… come on…" He tried to wriggle his arm closer by lifting himself further in, before he couldn't move anymore. When he tried to move back out of it, he found that he couldn't go that way either. Realising that he was stuck, he looked at the viewer with a deadpan expression. "Dang it."

 **THE END**


End file.
